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Vatnik Soup Profile picture
@P_Kallioniemi
Mar 30, 2023 • 21 tweets • 11 min read • Read on X
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In today's #vatniksoup, I'll introduce an English comedian, actor and conspiracy theorist, Russell Brand (@rustyrockets). He's best-known for his tendency to spread conspiracy theories and for his anti-establishment (well, basically their just anti-US/UK policy) views.

1/18
Now, when I say that Brand is a conspiracy theorist, I mean it. It seems that he believes pretty much EVERY conspiracy theory out there, including The Great Reset and "Klaus Schwab taking over the world through WEF", "microchips in vaccines", "Multipolar World",...

2/18
US and CIA-led coup d'etat in Ukraine, and NATO's expansion and proxy war against Russia. Brand's a fan of David Icke, whose worldview contains inter-dimensional, shapeshifting reptilians which have hijacked the earth.

3/18
Icke suggests that various public figures belong to the Babylonian Brotherhood, a fascist group that tries to establish New World Order by suppressing freedom of speech. He also endorses a fabricated, anti-Semitic scripture called " The Protocols of the Elders of Zion".
4/18
When discussing the Russo-Ukrainian conflict, Brand clearly has picked a side - based on Russell, the only culprits of the war are the US and the "military industrial complex". And most probably Klaus Schwab and his evil association known as the World Economic Forum...

5/18
The basic argument is that everything is infiltrated & everyone is controlled by the "deep state",thus making any kind of democratic efforts pointless. I mean,one of the title of his videos is "Prince Harry Saga – The TRUTH About The Deep State?" (with Clare Daly by the way) 6/18
As too many actors and actresses on social media, Brand has a huge following: he has over 6 million subscribers of YouTube and over 1 million over on Rumble. On Twitter, he has a whopping 11 million followers, even though it's mainly used for channeling people...

7/18
...to his YT and Rumble podcasts. This makes him one of the biggest outlets for conspiratorial content, and he's only surpassed by maybe Elon Musk, Joe Rogan and Donald Trump. After YouTube took down one of Brand's COVID-19 themed videos in...

8/18
..Sep, 2022, he moved to less-censored Rumble. Worried about losing that sweet, sweet YouTube money, Brand even produced an apology video but eventually took it down and said that "we made an error, in my opinion a relatively small error, and we are being ...

9/18
...penalised,and for me that looks like censorship". As an anti-capitalist, Russell evidently seems to worry about losing his main source of income, probably coming from Samsung and Coca Cola ads. You can also buy his T-shirts with cool anti-establishment statements for as..10/18
..low as 25,99 £. I mean, the man even monetized the famous 12 steps from AA/NA with his 2017 book, Recovery: Freedom from Our Addictions.

Watching Russell's podcasts is extremely exhausting, they are an endless stream of rambling about conspiracy theories and how the...

11/18
...mainstream media is quiet about them. But I did it, so you don't have to.

On his show, he's interviewed pro-Kremlin propagandists such as RT-funded Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Aaron Maté, Jimmy Dore and Seymour Hersh.

12/18
As is tradition, they barely mention Russia, mostly talking about the corruption both in the US and in Ukraine. In Mar 2022, Brand published a video titled "You've Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began". The video to date has garnered 3,1 million views, and in it Brand.. 13/18
...suggests, right after he's advertised his stand-up gigs, that the Revolution of Dignity was actually a US-backed coup d'etat. He bases this information on heavily biased op-ed by Branko Marcetic. In said op-ed, Marcetic suggested that the "coup" was funded by the US...

14/18
...because John McCain shook hands with Svoboda leader Oleh Tyahnybok and Victoria Nuland gave out sandwiches to both the protestors and the police, and said "Fuck the EU" during a phone call.

Brand also appeared as a commentator on a fellow anti-capitalist Tucker ...
15/18
...Carlson's show, apparently because he believes "change is possible". The Tucker Carlson, who was so worried about the stock price going down that he had a dissenting co-worker fired. Brand was "surprised" on how many things they "actually agreed on", and for some...

16/18
... reason this whole rant reminded me of a horseshoe.

To conclude, Brand is utilizing his career as a comedian and actor to spread wild conspiracy theories in his podcast with clickbait titles like "Why Zelensky REALLY Wants US Tanks". If there's something he's learned..
17/18
..from the American media culture,it's that fear sells: his rants about the end of days and deep state corruption are often seasoned with ads where he sells his stand-up gig or his mugs and T-shirts with corny slogans. You know, grifting and fearmongering for a hefty profit.18/18
Support my work: buymeacoffee.com/PKallioniemi

Past soups: vatniksoup.com

Related:
Conspiracy theories:
The Grayzone:
Glenn Greenwald:
Seymour Hersh:
Dore:
CORRECTION 1/18

Their = they're

Goddamnit.
Also, do read George Monbiot's (@GeorgeMonbiot) fantastic and thorough analysis on Brand:

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

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More from @P_Kallioniemi

Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Apr 26
What you see happening here is coordinated strategic communication by the Trump cult. Elon’s baby mama and former MAGA influencer Ashley St. Clair explained this ecosystem in a long video. They have built platforms where people can find narratives to spread and get paid for doing so.

Even though the system technically breaks the platform's ToS, this is perfectly fine for @nikitabier and the rest of the X crew, because Elon pays their salaries and this is part of his election interference machinery.Image
If you wanna know how the system works, read this:

Here’s Ashley’s video, where she explains how the system works. She was immediately attacked by various MAGA actors, which suggests that what she said hit a nerve.
Read 4 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Apr 13
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we introduce Yanis Varoufakis, a Greek economist and politician. He’s best known for rising to power at the height of the Greek debt crisis, not solving anything but endearing himself to the left, and using his fame to promote Russian imperialism.

1/20 Image
Born in 1961 in Athens, Varoufakis studied economics in the UK and built an academic career in Australia, the US, and Europe. His early work focused on game theory, political economy, and critiques of capitalism.

2/20 Yanis Varoufakis: How I became an erratic Marxist https://www.theguardian.com/news/2015/feb/18/yanis-varoufakis-how-i-became-an-erratic-marxist
Presenting himself as the fearless, unorthodox economist willing to confront the EU’s “neoliberal” elites, he rose to prominence during Greece’s debt crisis. At its height in 2015, he was appointed finance minister under the left-wing Syriza government of Alexis Tsipras.

3/20 Greek PM Alexis Tsipras appoints radical economist to new government https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/27/greek-pm-alexis-tsipras-economist-yanis-varoufakis
Read 20 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 29
In this 8th Debunk of the Day, we’ll discuss complaints about US financing of NATO, in particular how the US allegedly pays for European defense, leading to calls for a US withdrawal from the Alliance — which would only make it easier for Putin to invade more countries.

1/7 A flight of French and Polish Rafale and F-16 fighter jets above a NATO flag during the opening of the exhibition “Powerful because we are united”, dedicated to the 19th anniversary of Lithuania’s 2004 accession to NATO (OTD 22 years ago), in the bastion of the Vilnius defensive wall on March 29, 2023 (OTD 3 years ago) in Vilnius, Lithuania. (Photo by Oleg Nikishin/Getty Images)
NATO by itself costs peanuts. In fact, the core of NATO is a principle, an agreement, that ideally costs nothing. The main cost is defense spending, which the US is eagerly doing anyway: Trump has just announced a 50% increase in military spending for his “Department of War”.
2/7 Trump aides struggle with how to spend $500 billion more on military, Washington Post https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2026/02/21/trump-hegseth-budget-military/
Trump calls for US military spending to rise more than 50% to $1.5tn https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy59kxl2xwzo
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To sow division and thereby weaken the Alliance, vatniks deliberately mix up different figures, such as contributions to the NATO common budget, with defense spending. And US military spending has been huge by the sheer fact that the US is the world’s largest economy.

3/7 Newsweek falsely claiming that the US pays 68% of NATO’s budget. The real number is 15%.

Elon Musk falsely claiming that the US pays for 2/3 of European defense. In another post he claimed it was 1/4. Both made-up numbers. https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1870903805845598428 https://x.com/i/birdwatch/t/1870903805845598428
NATO has annual budgets and programs worth around EUR 4.6 billion in 2025 (representing 0.3% of total Allied defence spending), and up to EUR 5.3 billion in 2026. The US share for 2026-2027 is 15% of that: 0.8 billion. Source: Funding NATO https://www.nato.int/en/what-we-do/introduction-to-nato/funding-nato
Read 7 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 9
In today’s Vatnik Soup, we’ll talk about why we’re doing this: why we think Ukraine is so important and why we believe that souping vatniks and debunking their propaganda narratives is so crucial to counter Russia’s & their allies’ wars of aggression and achieve real peace.

1/20 Image
War is expensive, and Russia is not a rich country that could afford this: Hospitals? Roads? Plumbing? No: everything into terror and destruction.

But not only that. There is a 2nd item in the Russian state budget that remains strong no matter what:

2/20
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Manufacturing support for that terror and destruction. Propaganda. Vatniks. “Innocent” travel bloggers. “Independent” journalists. “Patriotic” politicians. Russia spends hundreds of billions of rubles a year ($5 billion) on this, and that kind of money buys you A LOT of BS.

3/20 Image
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Read 20 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Mar 2
In this second (and possibly last) Basiji Soup, we’ll explore how the Islamic Republic of Iran has prepared for a conflict with the US and Israel. We won’t cover the military aspects, but another kind of war — information warfare.

1/20 Image
In the 1st Basiji Soup, we souped the Islamic Republic, its disinformation operations, its hypocrisy, its support of terrorism including Russia’s, its (one-sided?) relationship with Putin, and the mass protests against it that started two months ago:

2/20
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The Internet blackout has been crucial in allowing the regime to cover up its massacre of the protesters and especially the scope of it, making it difficult to assess the number of victims. They went to great lengths to jam Starlink, after having made its use illegal.

3/20 Image
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Read 20 tweets
Vatnik Soup Profile picture
Feb 25
In this 7th Debunk of the Day, we’ll expose the “Chickenhawk” fallacy. The chickenhawk accusation or the “go to the front!” imperative is a dishonest attempt to silence anyone supporting Ukraine by pushing them to go fight. A barely hidden death wish, as it’s always uttered…
1/5 Image
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…with zero regard for who you are or what your personal circumstances might be — you could already be there, on your way there, a veteran, or unable to fight. More broadly, not everyone can or should be a soldier, just as not everyone can or should be a policeman or a nurse.
2/5 Image
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Yet a society still needs those things to be done, and the fact that not everyone can go to medical school or fight crime does not mean that we have to surrender to invaders and criminals, nor that we cannot all have an opinion on healthcare.
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Read 5 tweets

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